My name is Tanya Gold and I am a confessional journalist. Why do I do it? Am I selling my secrets for a mess of handbags? Am I a practitioner of a dark, self-loathing art, a noxious splice of masochism and exhibitionism that can end only in self-hatred or despair? Should there be no more enemas - in print?

Last week MediaGuardian published an article condemning confessional journalism. It said just that. Of course some confessional journalism is rubbish. Some columns are rubbish. Some foreign reporting is rubbish. There is rubbish everywhere, but does that mean we shouldn't write?

Confessional journalism is telling your secrets. There are pitfalls - I never write about people close to me without their permission - but I have written about my recovery from alcoholism, my eating disorder and my ex-boyfriends. I am very happy to write about alcoholism, because I think it is my responsibility to do so. Alcoholism is an astonishingly misunderstood disease, because it is so irrational. Someone actually wants to drink themselves to death? It is incomprehensible to a healthy mind. Alcoholics must be bad, or mad - they clog up the NHS with their whining, blah-blah, full stop.

It isn't easy to write these pieces. Sometimes I just talk to the Dictaphone, crying, trying to root out the truth, trying to evade polite-please-commission-me, and just get down to what really happened, and why? Because that, I believe, is good journalism. Not the publishable niceties - but the vomiting, the tears, the self-hatred, the monstrous things you will do for a drink. When I see it on the page it doesn't always feel as if I wrote it. But whenever I write about alcoholism, I get letters and emails from other alcoholics or their families, either recognising themselves or talking about the experience of living with, or trying to love, an alcoholic. It's a kind of vanity, I suppose - all hacks know the best writing comes from the best material, and if that is all I've got, then why shouldn't I write about it? I had the disease before I wrote about it, and I have it still. Publication changes nothing.

And the eating disorder? I mock myself in print, but that isn't why I write the pieces - it is just how I write them. Millions of women in Britain live with an eating disorder. They tumble into bulimia or anorexia, and often they don't talk about it, because mental illness isn't feminine. I like to counter this with vulgarity and details. Talk about taking diet pills and shitting yourself! Talk about bingeing and vomiting! It happens. Too many of the women who get page space in newspapers are glossy and airbrushed and famous or "important". Liz Hurley's dresses? Madonna's latest child? Who cares? I don't. What about the ordinary fat woman in an ordinary town with ordinary self-loathing? Why shouldn't she pick up a newspaper and find herself there? And if it makes her laugh, isn't that even better? Confessional journalism can make people realise that they are not alone - and that their newspaper sees them.

Then there are the boyfriends. I wrote about going to see some of my exes, and talking to them about what happened. I got a lot of flak for it but I wanted to tell the truth. If you wrote about your love life honestly, wouldn't it be just as disgusting?

Some of the best journalism in British newspapers is confessional. Any compilation of superb newspaper writing in the last 20 years would have to include Liz Jones's Diaries about her love life, John Diamond's columns about throat cancer and Ruth Picardie's Before I Say Goodbye columns for the Observer. Before she died of breast cancer last year, Dina Rabinovitch wrote a column in this newspaper about her illness. It was extraordinary, like a novel in real time. I used to wince over the details - the son who only ever called for his father when he knew his mother was too weak to move, her search for her last party dress.

I do confess to doubts. Sometimes, particularly with the diet columns, I look and I think - is that too much? Will I regret writing about the disgusting side effects of the diet pill for the Observer, for the Evening Standard, for Grazia, for the whole world? And then I think why not? Everyone has a story to tell, and if they want to, they should tell it. And this is mine.